JW - 2/9/2013

Excellent practice!  Virtually everything sounded good, which I attribute largely to changes in the sound mix.  Keith's guitar was quieter and I could hear everything!  It's amazing just how good we can be as a group when we can hear each other.

The three new songs should be ready for the next show.  And to top things off, Bill bought two wireless rigs (one for a headset, and the other for a microphone), so the stage show should be livelier next time with three of us being wireless.  Keith is now thinking about going wireless as well, which would be great.

On the downside, we played a few songs we haven't done for a while, and everybody had some rough moments here and there with them, just trying to remember things.  Clearly there's some review necessary, but we have another week of practice before we have to play most of those songs in public again.

There was some discussion of a possible new song for Helen, with Eurhymics and Pretenders songs coming up.  And for the rest of us, we were talking about doing some REM or U2, or even the '80's hit "Turning Japanese", which would be fun.

We were talking about our set lists for the upcoming shows during a break, and most of the band had songs that had been omitted from the list that they wanted to put back in for the next show.  Dale pointed out that those songs would have to replace something else, so he was looking for suggestions as to what to take out.  The reality is that everybody understandably wants to put our best foot forward whenever we play out, but at the same time, we need to have variety or people coming to see us will get bored, then stop coming.  Why have a 60+ song list if we're only going to use 2/3 of it?  I'm a big advocate of rotating songs, but most of the group resists doing anything so systematic.